Photo Credit: Moynihan United States Courthouse (US District Court for the Southern District of New York) by Americasroof / CC by 3.0
A new lawsuit alleges that Ticketmaster’s SafeTix mobile ticketing platform’s rotating barcode technology infringes on another company’s patent.
Ticketmaster is the focus of a new lawsuit alleging that the company’s mobile ticketing platform SafeTix copies patented rotating barcode technology. The lawsuit was filed last week by EChanging Barcode LLC in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
According to the filing—which is similar to other claims filed against Ticketmaster and its parent Live Nation, which were ultimately withdrawn last year—SafeTix infringes on U.S. Patent # 9,047,715. This patent covers the use of rotating encrypted barcodes to prevent screenshot fraud.
EChanging Barcode LLC is partly owned by inventor Alan Amron. The company has also filed a similar lawsuit in the same court against the digital media division of Major League Baseball (MLB). That lawsuit also concerns the rotating barcode tech.
News of the lawsuit comes just a couple of weeks after Ticketmaster said it would be making changes to its resale platform. These include banning users and ticket brokers from operating multiple accounts and closing down TradeDesk, the ticket inventory platform that enables ticket brokers to list their tickets on multiple sites.
Ticketmaster announced the changes after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued the company and its parent for allegedly colluding with brokers. However, Live Nation has insisted the changes were only made to curb reputational harm.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster were also accused of violating the 2016 BOTS Act, which prohibits the use of bots to purchase tickets. The ticketing giant asserted that over a billion dollars had been invested in bot prevention, and that it blocked 8.7 million bots in April this year alone.
But critics remain undeterred, particularly after a letter to Senators Marsha Blackburn and Ben Ray Lujan by Daniel Wall, Live Nation’s executive vice president for corporate and regulatory affairs. That letter, penned in response to a letter the lawmakers sent the company in September, further refuted claims that Live Nation and Ticketmaster engaged in any wrongdoing. But organizations like the National Independent Talent Organization (NITO) and the National independent Venue Association (NIVA) have doubled down.
“Ticketmaster nor any other platform should engage in reselling tickets above face value. This practice hurts both artists and their fans,” read a statement from NITO “We are encouraged that the FTC’s efforts have already led to Ticketmaster reforming its systems by canceling multiple broker accounts and improving its efforts regarding BOTS sweeps.”
“Live Nation’s ‘actions’ on resale detailed in a letter to Congress are too little and too late to get back the trust of fans, artists, and stages,” added a statement from NIVA. “They apparently got caught opening up their systems to predatory resellers, which is a betrayal of fans and artists. This looks like an attempt to clean up their devastated public image.”
